Netflix's 13 Reasons Why and the trouble with dramatising suicide

Netflix has been accused of dangerous sensationalism. But how best to tackle this traumatic subject? We talk to YA novelist Chloe Combi and director Katie Mitchell•Warning: contains spoilers for S-Town

Netflix's 13 Reasons Why and the trouble with dramatising suicide

Netflix has been accused of dangerous sensationalism. But how best to tackle this traumatic subject? We talk to YA novelist Chloe Combi and director Katie Mitchell•Warning: contains spoilers for S-Town

If there was a list of ways not to portray suicide, this would tick every box. The new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, adapted from the novel by Jay Asher, is about a teenager called Hannah Baker who takes her own life. She leaves behind a set of cassette tapes, each addressed to a different person in her life, detailing how they hurt her and contributed to her death.

It’s a revenge fantasy, so it portrays suicide as an act that will achieve something. It’s aimed at a young audience, who are particularly susceptible to contagion, and particularly likely to experience suicidal thoughts. It normalises and legitimises the act. It goes into too much and too graphic detail about the suicide itself – which is expressly against Ofcom guidelines because, however horrible it is to watch, this can still be read as a how-to.

The series depicts suicide as a reasonable response to a set of challenges that anybody might experience, and lays it at the feet of other people. It’s wrong from so many angles that it’s almost as if it were devised as a training manual for how not to use suicide as a plot point. Indeed, the Samaritans released a statement about the show that didn’t trouble itself overmuch with the details of the programme’s transgressions, perhaps considering them too obvious. Instead, the charity goes straight for Netflix: “It is extremely concerning that a drama series, aimed at a young audience, can be produced outside of the UK and made available to UK audiences and yet not subject to UK media regulation.”

It wasn’t until the opening line of 13 Reasons Why became a buzz-phrase that the show’s insensitivity became fully apparent. “Welcome to your tape” is how Baker addresses each of the characters as the episodes begin. It became a Twitter response to minor annoyance, as in: “Me: can I have a soy latte. Starbucks employee: we’re out of soy. Me: Welcome to your tape.” This show has done more than trivialise and normalise an achingly needless cause of death, one that leaves a seam of pain in the landscape around it for ever. It has actually introduced that triviality into the lexicon.

One in five adults will experience suicidal ideation at some point in their lives. Silence intensifies the shame that already accompanies such thoughts. The important thing is to discuss the idea of suicide as a feeling, rather than the act as something final – and thereby liberating or cathartic. In this way, 13 Reasons Why breaks the cardinal rule: don’t look for external causes or circumstances that could happen to anybody when you’re dealing with suicide. The important thing is not to present it as a reasonable, if extreme, response.

To look for a culprit is to simplify something that leaves only chaos

In its treatment of suicide as an event with a cause, the series somehow also manages to misrepresent all the other possible events of a teenager’s life. As Chloe Combi, author of Generation Z, the most insightful book on modern teens I have ever read, says of the show: “I don’t think you can properly explore the impact of date rape, or of sexual shaming, or of losing your best friend, if your starting point is that you’re analysing suicide as an act and looking at those things as reasons.”

The adult world often deems topics inappropriate for children, even while children are actually living through those inappropriate topics. Young adult fiction is a vital corrective. As the author Sophie Hamilton says: “It’s very important that kids have books that discuss the issues they’re facing in a grown-up way. Just that feeling that you’re not alone gives you strength.”

So just because Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why does a disservice to Asher’s book, it doesn’t mean, of course, that suicide should never be portrayed in culture. At the Royal Court in London, rehearsals are under way for Anatomy of a Suicide, opening in June, written by Alice Birch. The play, which has three scenes happening simultaneously all the time, is about three generations of women. It considers the extent to which suicide is inherited.

Its director, Katie Mitchell, knows how “perilous” the territory is. “No play could claim to fully investigate suicide,” she tells me. “Plays have a narrow spectrum of investigation. We’re trying to make three characters, and make those characters make choices.” Unlike 13 Reasons Why, in which, as Combi points out, “the characters are all very underdeveloped”.

The complexity comes when the demands of drama – suspense, resolution, good guys, bad guys – meet the realities of suicidal despair, in which none of those frames are very helpful.

In the US, 13 Reasons Why has often been contrasted with S-Town, the latest piece of investigative journalism from the makers of the hit podcast Serial. It starts as one story – of corruption, violence, unsolved murder, cover-ups – and abruptly, halfway through, turns into something else: the horrific suicide of its protagonist, its reasons and its aftermath.

That description makes it sound as if it breaks the cardinal rule. And it does, to an extent. But its investigation does something important and humane, which is to exculpate another person who, inevitably otherwise, would have blamed himself. However, non-fiction raises a whole new thicket of thorns: a real person killed himself, and the dissection of his despair has a voyeuristic tang.

Maybe it’s OK, and laudable even, to consider in such close detail the interior life – the history, the secrets, the pain, the delusions – of the man who is gone, but can it possibly be edifying to enjoy it so much? Whichever way you cut it, it’s a whodunnit, though the question isn’t so much “who” done it as “which emotion”. And that gives it a thrilling pace, each inquiry reaching a crescendo of curiosity, which is then released in a discovery.

It just doesn’t feel right when there is a real tragedy at its core. As soon as a real event takes on the rhythm of a story, the audience becomes a jury, arbitrating right and wrong. So, as a listener, you can know that a suicide should never be ascribed to, or blamed on, another person or event and yet still do it.

Often, especially with a historical suicide, the act has been filed in the collective consciousness as a mystery, meaning there’s excitement in finding a clue. The recent discovery of letters from the poet Sylvia Plath to her American therapist turned friend Ruth Barnhouse, in the two years before her suicide in 1963, revealed a claim that Ted Hughes was violent towards her, beat her up two days before she had a miscarriage, and openly wished she would die. His estate strenuously denies this.

The temptation is to feed this new information into the algorithm of what drove Plath to take her life. Indeed, it feels as though it would dishonour her memory not to. Yet to look for a culprit at all in suicide is to misrepresent, flatten out and simplify the truth of it, give the neatness of a reason to an act that can never be neat, an act that leaves only loose ends and chaos.

Ultimately, whether fictional or not, the account of a suicide plays with this grenade: it is so difficult – whether by glamorising it or making it thrilling, whether you find a cause or accept no cause – to render it as anything but definitive and final. Whereas suicide is anything but final. It echoes into everything afterwards. It is the definition of a life unfinished.

Samaritans can be contacted for free on 116 123, or visit Mind’s website.